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Comment Re:If Only This Were Parody (Score 2) 115

"how the billions of dollars are to be spent (every member nation has 1 year to ante up $1B)."

The UK couldn't build HALF a high speed railway for over £100 billions.

How would they build desalination plants, hospitals, ALL the sewage, electricity, drinking water infrastructure etc etc, for the puny sums they have planned?
It's not even enough to remove the rubble.

And that's even before putting up a brick for a single hospital or school.

Comment No need to buy working 'farms' (Score 2) 95

In calendar year 2025, there were 315 farm bankruptcy filings under Chapter 12 (the farm bankruptcy code), up about 46 % from 2024. That number is one of the highest in recent years (though still below the peaks of the 1980s and early 2010s).
I let you guess why.

The total number of U.S. farms fell by about 15 000 in 2025, bringing the national total to roughly 1.865 million farms. That drop is partly due to closures, consolidations, and exits from farming.

Comment For us dumbnuts (Score 4, Insightful) 33

Imagine a big box of numbered balls. Someone secretly chooses half of them, that’s set S. You are only allowed to pull balls from S. Your job is to give back one ball that is NOT in S.

Classical world: every time you pull a ball, you just see one number. If the box is big, you have to pull a lot of balls before you’re confident which numbers are missing. Basically, you keep a list of what you’ve seen and guess something not on the list. You might need tons of samples.

Quantum world: instead of one ball at a time, you get a magic “wave ball” that contains all of S at once, like all its numbers are smeared together in a superposition. With some clever quantum tricks, you can flip that wave so it now represents “everything that is not S.” Then you measure it and boom, you get a number from outside S.

So the shocker is this: one quantum sample versus lots and lots of classical samples.

They also argue this isn’t just a weird edge case. Under normal crypto assumptions, classical computers really can’t fake this efficiently.

Important detail: if you convert the quantum thing into ordinary classical samples first, the magic disappears. The power comes from keeping the “wave” intact.

So the paper is basically saying, look, quantum computers are not just faster calculators, they sometimes need far less data to do a job. That’s the whole punchline.

Comment WTF did they DO all that time? (Score 3, Informative) 20

Kids didn’t suddenly read Kant. They migrated.

Typical substitutions:

YouTube in the browser
Mobile web versions of TikTok/Instagram
Discord via browser
online games
group chats
streaming sites
short-video aggregators

In other words: the behavior remained even when the app disappeared.

Comment HSBC must know (Score 3, Interesting) 54

Fair. Here is the actually concise version.

Major HSBC scandals:

2012 — Money laundering & sanctions violations
Helped launder cartel money and processed transactions for Iran, Cuba, Sudan.
Fine: $1.9 billion.

2015 — Swiss Leaks tax evasion scandal
Swiss private bank helped wealthy clients hide assets offshore.

2019 — U.S. tax evasion case
Assisted Americans hiding assets in Swiss accounts.
Fine: ~$192 million.

2020 — FinCEN Files
Revealed HSBC moved large suspicious funds even after the 2012 settlement.

2021 — UK anti-money-laundering failures
Fine: £63.9 million.

Interest-rate manipulation (Euribor cartel)
Participation in benchmark-rate rigging.
EU fine ~€31 million.

UK government bond trader cartel
Illegal information sharing between traders.
Part of ~£105 million industry fines.

Deposit protection failures (UK)
Failed to correctly safeguard customer deposits.
Fine: £57 million.

Hong Kong disclosure breach (2025)
Failed to disclose conflicts in research reports.
Fine: ~$4 million.

Core pattern (one line):
Money laundering, tax evasion facilitation, sanctions breaches, market manipulation, weak compliance controls.

That’s the short list.

Comment Just statistics (Score 1) 38

Every child normally has about 50–100 de novo point mutations compared to their parents.
That’s just replication errors plus background DNA damage. Most are harmless.

Clustered de novo mutations, cDNMs, mean two or more new mutations sitting very close together on the chromosome. These are thought to arise from a single local DNA damage event, like a double-strand break that gets repaired imperfectly.

Are cDNMs normal in people without radiation exposure? Yes. They occur at baseline frequency in everyone. DNA breaks happen spontaneously from reactive oxygen species produced by normal metabolism. Cells constantly repair them. Sometimes the repair leaves small scars, which show up as clusters.

So having two clustered mutations in a genome is not extraordinary. The key question in that study is statistical: do children of irradiated fathers have a higher count of such clusters than matched controls?

If the average in controls were, say, 1 cluster per genome and exposed offspring showed 2–3 on average, that’s a shift in distribution, not a biological apocalypse. The wording “significant increase” usually means statistically significant, not huge in magnitude.

Also important: clustered does not automatically mean harmful. Most of the genome is non-coding. Even in coding regions, many mutations are silent or benign.

Radiation increases double-strand breaks. That mechanistically fits with more clustered mutations. But low-dose exposure decades ago producing only small increases and no detectable health effect is biologically plausible.

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